The bell would ring at one, according to the adjutant’s schedule. It left her an hour to accomplish what she’d been desperate to do all morning long.
She pressed her hand to her stomach: fluid with apprehension, now that her moment was at last here.
‘I’m scared,’ she found herself calling to her friend.
Clare stopped, turning to face her, her smile taking on a pained slant.
‘What of?’ she asked.
‘That he won’t want to see me. Or that he’s married. A father, even … ’
‘No.’ Clare shook her head. ‘Not a chance.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I can. I’ve got powers, remember.’
‘Seriously … ’
‘I am being serious,’ said Clare. ‘Put it from your mind.’
‘It’s not only that,’ said Iris, putting nothing from her mind. ‘I’ve got this … ’ She broke off, struggling to name the heaviness she’d felt hanging over her since she’d been watching the flares the night before. ‘Sense, I suppose, that it’s going to … Well … ’ She stared into Clare’s gaze. ‘Hurt.’
‘Oh, Iris,’ said Clare, moving back to stand before her, taking her hand. ‘What good thing doesn’t hurt, these days?’
Iris nodded, acknowledging it.
Because what happiness was there anywhere, any more, that wasn’t shadowed by the terror of it being ripped away?
‘I loathe it,’ she said.
‘We all do,’ said Clare, thinking, Iris knew, of her own Robbie, whose ring she wore around her neck, but whose name couldn’t be mentioned, except in whispers, because it was Hans.
She’d told Iris, in whispers, of how the pair of them had met, in the summer of 1934, when she’d been seventeen, and her diplomat father had been posted in Berlin. She’d gone to a dance, and a mutual friend had introduced her to Hans. ‘There was a swing band,’ she’d said, ‘that hadn’t been banned there yet. Hans swept me off my feet, quite literally, and that –’ she’d smiled – ‘was that. The next morning, he came to the house and asked me to go swimming. That evening, he took me dancing again. The next morning, for another swim. I couldn’t believe my luck. He was fun, and handsome, and whip-smart, and made me laugh until it hurt.’ She’d shrugged. ‘It hurtmuch more, of course, the deeper I fell for him, and the worse everything got.’
It was in the spring of 1939 that Hans’s father, a left-leaning politician, who Clare never spoke of without a catch in her throat, was executed by the SS. Hans was invited to join the Luftwaffe then, as a fighter pilot, to demonstrate loyalty to the Reich on behalf of his mother and sisters. He went, because he had to, but asked Clare to marry him before he left.
‘I cried,’ she said, ‘so did he. His father was gone, and mine was telling me we’d have to leave too. We were being watched constantly by that point. Hans couldn’t hold the ring steady when he put it on my finger. We both knew it was a pipe dream, but we set the date anyway, for his first leave, in September. I was back here by then, obviously. We left in such a rush when the Nazis moved against Poland, I barely had time to write Hans goodbye. I don’t even know if he got the letter.’
She still wrote to him, every day: pages and pages that she couldn’t post, but which she said brought him closer, helping her hold faith he was alive.I haven’t lost faith.Iris wished there was something she could say or do to make it easier for her, but of course there wasn’t.So, she did the only thing she could: she listened, whenever Clare needed her to.
And now, squeezed her hand.
‘Go,’ said Clare, squeezing her back. ‘You’re wasting time.’
‘Yes,’ Iris agreed, and, chilled by another wave of disquiet – at just how little time she and Robbie might have – she went, in search of him.
The house was all but empty in the lead-up to lunch. Iris did see a couple of airmen when she returned to the entrance hall – both heading to the officer’s mess in the library (‘Utterly off limits to you,’ the adjutant had told her and Clare) – but they didn’t look at Iris with startlingly blue eyes, nor did their inquisitive smiles make her heart sing.
They weren’t Robbie.
It came to her, as she looked for him – moving from the hall, to the billiards room, out to the misty front steps (she was ready for the uneven one this time, tapping her toes to its edge and skipping past) – that she was revisiting all the places she’d pictured them meeting in her dreams. If only he’d cooperate by appearing. Casting a frustrated look around the carriage circle, she headed back inside, following those other officers up to the library – where she was just raising her hand to knock on the door when another airman who wasn’t Robbie opened it.
‘Well, hello,’ he said. He had fair floppy hair, and wore tartan slippers. Iris wondered if his mother had given them to him for Christmas. ‘Can I help you? Please say, yes.’
‘Yes,’ she obliged, and didn’t salute him – he was a flying officer, from his single stripe: the equivalent rank to her – just told him she was looking for Robbie Grayson, and hoped he didn’t notice the strain in her voice.
‘Ah, Robbie is it?’ he said, the skin around his bloodshot eyes creasing in a knowing smile. (Clearly, he had noticed the strain.) ‘Sly dog. He never told me he had a girl.’
